Why I love F/LOSS

In the midst of working on a very long, very passionate, and very complex essay about why the time of European data sovereignty should also be the time of software we run on our own computers, I found myself wanting to roll back to the basics. Indeed, I found myself wanting to first write about my relationship to Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS), and why I think F/LOSS matters – especially for people who don’t yet know it well.

Inside the world of F/LOSS, there are all kinds of internecine fights over things that are perfectly legitimate and worthwhile to fight about, but that are also incredibly specific. Outside of that very specific world, floss goes between your teeth and the term “open source” mostly means what you want it to mean. What, then, is F/LOSS, and why do I think it’s necessary to talk about before we talk about things like sovereign technology ecosystems?

For starters, I’ll admit to having rose-tinted glasses. F/LOSS has been a big part of my life, and many of the projects I’ve done over the years have been about helping a more general public grasp what’s at stake in debates about ownership of technology. (For example, the project I document in my “Digging the internet” essay.) I’m definitely predisposed to say nice things about F/LOSS, because I’m invested in it. In some instances, my friends make the software I use, and I’m not over finding that incredibly cool. But that’s not a very scalable argument for thinking that F/LOSS has wide social applicability.

Defining terms

Let’s start with the actual nuts and bolts. F/LOSS 101, if you will. We have an acronym. The acronym stands for Free/Libre and Open Source Software. You’ve probably heard the term “Open Source” before, including in contexts which aren’t explicitly about software. Open Source Software and Free Software are two different terms for essentially the same thing. There are some differences between the two, and those differences are important enough to create substantive disagreements, but for our purposes here, the objective is more or less the same.

Both Open Source Software and Free Software are software which allows users to access the human-readable code, to modify it, and to re-distribute it. This is the essential thing about Free Software and Open Source Software: a set of rights allowing you to study, modify, and distribute. That’s FOSS. Why chuck an extra letter "L" into the acronym, when FOSS covers the bases? Because “Free” is an ambiguous word, and it pays to remove the confusion between “Libre” and “Gratis.” It’s also much faster than the commonly-used disambiguator “Free as in speech, not as in beer.” The point of the “Free” in Free Software is the granting and guaranteeing of a set of freedoms when interacting with a piece of software.

User agency

That’s the very basic part out of the way. So why do I care about it? Why, indeed, do I go so far as to say that I love it? And why, if you don’t care about it already, do I think you should also care about (and maybe even come to love) F/LOSS? Aside from community, which is important, and aside from the idea that one might play with computers as a hobby, the thing I find essential about F/LOSS is agency. You don’t need to like playing with computers, and you don’t need to want to meet other computer enthusiasts, to want to have your computer work the way you want it to work.

I know this is a radical idea. Surely, computer usage today is more about having things done to you than for you. That may sound a little partisan. And I’m not coming here to preach Linux at you. I’m not here to tell you that it’s bunk that you can either pay extra for a Mac or put up with all the distractions you’re now subjected to in Windows – and that that’s a really false set of options. Instead, I want to talk about the principle that it should be possible (even only theoretically, for a lot of us non-programmers) to understand why your computer is doing the things it’s doing, to be guaranteed the right to study why it does that, and to perhaps change it if you don’t like it.

As with a lot of principles that are abstract for more people than they’re concrete for, it may not feel personally useful to be able to understand and modify the software you use. But you personally being unlikely to do the examining and modifying, means just that. You might not do it, but someone else can and might, and what they do can benefit you. So much of computation as we know it is built on being able to examine and modify the work of others – so much knowledge and utility comes from building on what’s already there.

But it’s not just the utility – personal or social – of the modifications that matters. Agency is not just in changing the software, it’s also in being able to use it. Think about the last time a change got rolled out in an online platform you use. The recommendation engine on TikTok stops showing you things you used to like; a button gets moved in your online email inbox. That’s your life now, and you have to adapt or change your habits. There’s a profound absurdity in the idea that the tools we use on a daily basis can suddenly change and suddenly become less useful, less enjoyable, more hostile, whatever. But if there’s one thing years of user uproars have taught technology companies, it’s that users will mostly just put up with changes they don’t like, and eventually get used to them.

We need the tools

So I’m going to humbly suggest that one of the major reasons I love F/LOSS is because it creates a framing for good and principled work on software and its ecosystems. I’m not saying that all developers of Free/Libre and Open Source Software are wonderful humans who always make good choices, but the existence of F/LOSS creates a legal and technical frame in which user rights matter. It institutionalizes and passes on practices which might otherwise be easily run over by the desire for more growth and more cash. It’s a bit like a chocolate kettle in the face of corporate greed, but that’s also, at its heart, why you might want to consider being interested, caring, and perhaps eventually even loving F/LOSS too.

If you hate Copilot being suddenly in your word processor, maybe you might like LibreOffice instead. If you use Illustrator sometimes and don’t like the price hikes, you might find Inkscape worthwhile. Interest, care, a little affirmation, and the occasional donation all make the ecosystem of alternatives richer and more viable.

Code that’s written out in the open, available for public scrutiny, and licensed to allow modification makes computation better all around. Like many 2000s kids, I learned how to make websites by looking at the source code of other websites. I learned HTML and CSS by seeing the things other people did and examining them. Without being able to see the source, who knows how I would've learned those skills. And heck, making websites as a teenager was a major part of what led me to design school. F/LOSS is like that, times ten. There is a huge, visible codebase out in the world, being worked on in public, and we get to use the outputs of that enormous store of human ingenuity and cooperation.

We’re at a juncture right now where the technical literacies being pushed mostly have to do with prompting black boxes to produce unpredictable outputs. In this race to the bottom, in this quest to learn to romance the black box, we need to give care to the things that are already open, already explainable, made with intent, and made with certain freedoms in mind. F/LOSS is all of these things to me, and many more, and that’s why I love it. You don’t need to love it, maybe you’re only just getting acquainted. But even if it doesn’t have your love yet, F/LOSS deserves your attention, your understanding, and your interest. We can’t make a better world if we don’t have access to the tools.